Ah. Now that this eternal election is finally over and I can stop hammering the dumb-as-nails right wingnuts, I can get back to my favorite subject: sex! Here's a beauty from the latest New Yorker Magazine, an article called, "Red Sex, Blue Sex: Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?" by one Margaret Talbot.
From the article:
"The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents — seventy-four per cent — say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their 'sexual début' shortly after turning sixteen. Another key difference in behavior is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception."
Okay, folks, put it together in your head, because I know at first blush, it may not compute - professing abstinence and NOT expecting pleasure leads to MORE SEX, and MORE UNPROTECTED SEX at that!
Get it? Hypocrisy - and yes, forgive me, "Rick," STUPIDITY - on the part of these parents has a way of outing itself through subconsciously motivated actions. Lame adults who teach their kids that their most powerful natural desires are sinful, that somehow nature and the way we're made is flawed, are putting their kids in such tremendous conflict with themselves that acting out becomes inevitable. On the other hand, kids that are taught to love their bodies and to expect pleasure, develop the capacity for patience and practicality when it comes to sex. It's not the "forbidden fruit" that Evangelicals think Eve partook of in the Garden to all of our detriment. In fact, the forbidden fruit was the development of self-consciousness, of a reflective ego. Remember? The parable in the Old Testament says that "they realized that they were naked." It doesn't say that they realized they were horny!
Anyway, glad to be back after a few days off basking in the shift in mass consciousness that just occurred.
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